Columbia - For
All of Us

There's no better place
to emphasize the unity of people in the world than flying to space. It goes the
same for any country, Arab country, whatever -- we are all the same people, we
are all human beings and I believe that most of us, almost all of us, are good
people.Astronaut Ilan Ramon (Israel) 04, January 2003.

"The world
looks marvelous from up here, so peaceful, so wonderful
and so fragile. Everybody, all of us down there, not
only in Israel, have to keep it clean and good."— Astronaut Ilan Ramon (Israel) 29,
January 2003

The tragic loss of the Columbia astronauts on February
1, 2003 should be mourned by all humanity. They died
fighting the age old battle of humanity against the
elements. In their lives, they tried so hard
to represent the very best of all of us. They fought for all of us, and
lived and died for a better future for the peoples of
the world. A world of peaceful cooperation.

Farewell friends, rest in peace. Others will follow and
will succeed, because you tried.

Israeli-Palestinian
Cooperation in Space

Jerusalem Post
- Feb. 5, 2003Cosmic indifferenceBy LAUREN GELFOND

A Palestinian
and an Israeli student find that politics pale compared to the
workings of the cosmos

Tariq Adwan clapped his hands and jumped into the passenger
seat of the rented car, smiling. It had been a long day and he
was anxious to resume the search for kosher food. As the sun was
setting, he buckled up and ran his index finger over the map of
Cape Canaveral.

The 19-year-old Palestinian Muslim from Bethlehem does not
keep kosher, but his Israeli science partner does, and he was
hungry. The two had spent hours driving around that week, and
when no kosher restaurants were to be found, they had followed
the few Jewish stars on the map to synagogues for advice. The
two looked at each other knowingly and burst out laughing. It
wasn't a typical Israeli-Palestinian adventure.

Adwan first met Yuval Landau, 29, in mid-January, after the
Planetary Society accepted their independent biology proposals
on condition that they join forces to load a joint project on
the Columbia space shuttle.

After they were flown to Florida on January 14, two days
before the shuttle's launch, Adwan identified Landau in the
bustling airport from the only telltale sign he could find:
Landau was wearing a kippa.

Kalpana "KC" Chawla
working in the Spacehab module aboard the
Columbia. To the left, above her head, is the
ITA CIBX device, containing the GOBBSS
experiment of Israel medical student, Yuval
Landau, and Palestinian biology student, Tariq
Adwan, which she activated on the first day of
the mission. [Photo by
STS-107 crew, courtesy of NASA. MidEastWeb
gratefully acknowledges the cooperation of
Dr. David Warmflash of NASA. ]

"Yuval?" he asked, raising his eyebrows. Grinning, they shook
hands and embraced. Later they would describe each other as nice
guys and brilliant scientists.

"Both are interested citizens of the cosmos, and that goes
way beyond politics," says a principle investigator on their
experiment, Dr. David Warmflash of NASA's National Astrobiology
Institute.

"We were looking for the principles of life, and if you put
political issues in this context they seem so small."

Landau, an MD-PhD student in Tel Aviv University's Excellence
Program, had never had a Palestinian work or study partner
before, or even a Palestinian friend. But the two hit it off
from their first telephone and e-mail contacts, speaking to each
other in English, primarily about biology. Their experiment
would take bacteria into space to see how such microorganisms
grow, and how stresses such as cosmic radiation, dryness, and
weightlessness affect them. The two wanted to find out if thin
layers of microbial cells, known as "biofilms," would form.
Bacteria can survive extreme environments by forming biofilms.
Since the 1996 discovery of what some scientists believe are
fossilized microorganisms embedded in a Martian rock that landed
in Antarctica, it has been an open question whether
microorganisms can survive interplanetary travel, perhaps as a
biofilm.

The Planetary Society's less-than-subtle mandate required
that the two work together to choose and lose aspects from their
original proposals to create a joint one. Echoing a kind of
peace plan, the final project would include concessions,
agreed-upon goals and a sharing and division of labor. The fact
that their project was studying relationships between foreign
organisms was the first coincidence.

"I wasn't surprised to meet an open-minded Palestinian," says
Landau. "I understood that most of the problems probably derive
from a minority of people, and that is the saddest part, because
they have the primary influence. I knew there is a silent
majority that thinks and behaves differently."

Still, he says meeting Adwan did affect him. "It is a
different kind of learning to get to know a person as a human
being."

Adwan had previously been in programs with Jewish Israelis.

"When they told me I was to work with an Israeli, I felt the
same as I would have if they had told me I was working with an
Arab or an American," he says. "We look at each other as
scientists who are curious and enthusiastic about research."

But there was a political aspect, he admits.

"This made it more interesting. You could even say it gave it
a beautiful flavor."

Adwan comes from a Bethlehem family that was once involved in
Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction. Today the father, with the
family's blessing, works on joint Israeli-Palestinian education
projects - a change in attitude that dates back to a 1991 stay
in an Israeli prison.

When Bethlehem University history professor Sami Adwan was
arrested that year, three days after the birth of his other son,
he was held in military detention for nearly six months without
trial or official charges, he says.

Adwan sat day after day in his cell, depressed, until one
afternoon a soldier appeared with a form for him to sign.
Because it was written in Hebrew, which Adwan can neither read
nor speak, he refused to sign. When a second soldier saw the
altercation, he looked at the form, and spoke harshly to the
first officer.

Though Adwan couldn't understand the words spoken, he
experienced a revelation, even before a Hebrew-speaking Arab
translated.

"I used to see all Israelis as [the same]," he said. "But I
saw this message: two soldiers of the same rank, same uniform,
same language, but with totally different points of view about
what was appropriate."

Later, alone in his cell, he started to realize that not only
were the Palestinians there imprisoned, but so were the
Israelis.

"The Israeli guards couldn't leave the prison either. In a
way, we were both caged, and I asked myself, who is jailing
whom? Maybe we were jailing each other."

When Adwan was released, he went home changed. "I wasn't
treated badly, but it was very painful for me to be put in jail
on an assumption of suspicion," he said. "But I had a lot of
time to contemplate the future, and realized that the only way
is for Palestinians and Israelis to see each other as humans and
to have sympathy for each other's disasters."

It was Shabbat afternoon, and Landau, now back in Israel, was
not answering his phone.

Adwan knew not to phone him on Shabbat but it was an
emergency, he figured. From his dormitory room at Misericordia
College in the US, he had just heard the news: The shuttle had
broken up.

Adwan paced the square room and tried to stop trembling. He
stood up and sat down. He flipped between the news stations. He
ran to the bathroom a few times, thinking he was going to throw
up.

"I was glued to the news for the 16 days of the mission. I
was in touch daily with Yuval and with the principle
investigators [from NASA and the Israeli Aerospace Institute],"
he says. "This relationship to the shuttle became part of my
life. The seven astronauts were our heroes, and our hands up in
space. I just don't know how to accept that they and all this
have just disappeared from the world."

As his hometown of Bethlehem was suffering under military
curfew, Adwan was also mourning the death of Israel's first
astronaut, a military hero.

"I see him as a scientist, and as scientists our
collaborations go beyond political differences," he says. "I am
very sad about all the astronauts, but especially about Ramon."

Finally Landau phoned. Sitting down in a chair Adwan pressed
the receiver between his head and shoulder, and tapped his
stockinged feet quickly on the floor. "Did you hear?" he said
before hello.

"If it were possible to give up this experiment and bring
Ilan Ramon back to life I would," said Landau, crushed.

"We were both devastated, and shared condolences. It's a very
difficult time, but it was good to talk to each other," Adwan
says the next day.

"It was emotional and interesting. We came to the conclusion
that even though the science part failed, the symbolic part, a
result of our collaborative work, still existed." Soon after,
Dr. Eran Schenker, director of the Israel Aerospace Medical
Institute, reported that the Israeli-Palestinian experiment had
just been discovered among the crash debris. Now both students
are hoping for a miracle - that the container holding the
experiment was not damaged. If so, they will be sent back to
help NASA investigators analyze the results.

But if the experiment remains only a memory, all parties
involved say they are still connected by shared experiences:
grief, the taste of being participants in history, and the goal
of changing the world through science.

Cooperation was easy, Landau and Adwan admit, compared to
finding kosher food near NASA headquarters, making sense of the
cosmos - and dealing with an unthinkable tragedy.